First, Idol Survivor continues over at Dreamwidth, with the current voting round ending today (Friday). All eliminations are team-based, which makes things especially painful. My team lost a fantastic writer and friend last week, owing to a family crisis.

So, if you can, please go to the poll here and vote for me and ALL my teammates:

bsgsix
eeyore_grrl
gunwithoutmusic
halfshellvenus
impoetry
lawchicky819
megatronix
minikin25
wolfden

And if you aren't comfortable with that, then please read the entries and vote for the ones you like. Thank you!

Second... Boy, I thought the "Grow-it-yourself" Homeropus was slow to reach his full size, but it looks like the reverse process of returning to his original size was even slower!

Here's his full size, before I took him out of the water for good on Sept 29. It took him about 15-16 days to get this big:





But fully shrinking down to his original size has taken about 36 days. When I took the first 'growth' picture, I remember thinking that he'd started out being about 4 inches long. Over time, that idea seemed ridiculous, and I thought I must have imagined it. But take a look at the final photo:

 6 days of shrinkage         16 days of shrinkage (fat starfish phase)     19 days of shrinkage

28 days of shrinkage              36 days of shrinkage      36 days of shrinkage at exactly 4" tall!

And you know, if I were to put him back in the water... he would grow all over again! \o/

Now that the "Grow-it-yourself" Homeropus is out of the water, he's slowly shrinking:

 Today (6 days of shrinkage)                     Maximum size

But he's doing it in a strange way. I mean, doesn't he look a tad... fabulous... in the picture on the left? (Maybe you can't see it--some of the tips are now pointing upward). The water is evaporating much more quickly at the ends, so there are those twisty tentacle tips (with flair!) and then the fat, rubbery middle is almost unchanged. :O

I could swear there's a blue cartoon hat-wearing octopus in a similar pose, but the context just isn't coming to me... In any case, I've put a big ketchup-bottle lid between him and the plate now, to let air flow underneath. We'll see if that changes the shrinking pattern at all. :)

In other news, HalfshellHusband is still having a hard time. He's able to get around a little using his walker, though it's painful and tiring. But mainly, things hurt all day and all night (including while he's trying to sleep). It all just gets exhausting. This actually hurts more than the hip replacement surgeries did, which could be because most of the soreness is deep bone pain rather than muscle pain. He's looking forward to when it only hurts if he stands on the broken leg, instead of while he's just sitting or lying down. :(

It's been hot again here, and smoky. The week before last, I bicycled outside 5 times. That was followed by a week and a half of riding indoors, mainly because of the smoke. While a couple of the bigger wildfires from August are almost entirely contained now, several new ones broke out a little over a week ago, so the cycle continues. By the end of the day, it starts to seep into the house until it smells like the inside of a chain-smoker's car. :(

I think I've ridden in the garage (and then the laundry room, thanks to the smoke) more times this summer than I have during ANY winter in the 30+ years I've lived in Sacramento. It's maddening. Elementary, S2 is still sitting in the DVD machine out in the garage. In the laundry room, the WiFi is strong enough that I can finally catch up on some of the Netflix streaming shows that HalfshellHusband doesn't want to see.

So, I'm up-to-date now on Better Call Saul, which is getting increasingly depressing (not surprisingly). If there were a version of it that was just The Amazing Mike Ermantraut, HSH would watch that in a heartbeat, but he doesn't like the rest of the characters. I can't blame him. Mike's sub-stories are definitely my favorite parts. The utter creativity and sheer competence of that character are just fantastic. Now I'm watching A Series Of Unfortunate Events, because HSH thought the premiere episode was kind of dull. That may be because he has no memory of ever reading any of the books. The episodes are not fast-paced, but they're compelling, and reflect an obvious love of the books. The art direction alone! *swoons* The casting of Patrick Warburton as the drily humorous Lemony Snicket! *swoons again* I like the overall casting quite a bit, as well as the unexpected racial diversity. "Mr Trick" (as I think of him) is a delight as the cheerfully clueless Mr. Poe, and Alfre Woodard was a wonderful surprise as Aunt Josephine. I can't get the show's theme song out of my head these days, but it's worth it.

What next after that, though? I just started S3, and at the rate things are going with the outdoors here, I need to start looking ahead. But at the moment, I need to go to bed. :O

Just in case you've been waiting for news on our rubbery, immersible, self-growing friend...

It's been two weeks now since I first put this creature in water, and he hasn't gotten any bigger in the last couple of days, so I think it's fair to say he's reached his maximum size.

I might be a little disappointed? I mean, the label said he'd grow 600% (i.e., 6 times larger). So I was hoping for huge, creepy, RAWR-I-will-crush-your-puny-boat-Mwah-ha-ha-ha-HAAAAAH! things. \o?

But as our son pointed out, the projected size-increase could refer to his fatness as well as his length. And honestly, with other grow-it-yourself creatures, it usually does. (Darned if I don't wish I knew where I put that growable vampire a few years ago, since I never tried him out and I bought him because of the absurdity. *ahem*). The Homeropus (as I've decided to call him) is definitely much bigger and fatter than he originally was. Also rubbery, in case you were wondering. And? I mistakenly hit the "Google links" button on my phone when I was taking pictures of him, and Google decided he might be a bunch of bananas instead. :O

Here's the final size comparison:

Today (Day 16)                                          Day 1

Measured (about 9" in diameter)     |      Top View Closeup      |  Textured Underside With Serial #

Now he's out of the water, where he'll stay for as long as the evaporation process takes. The slow reversal begins... :D

A progress report on our little home experiment:

  Today (Friday)                                             Wednesday

You can actually see that his eyes and one of the tentacles have emerged from the water-- and I just added water yesterday until he went under.

He doesn't grow quickly, but he IS getting bigger. That bowl is 11 inches in diameter, for reference. How much bigger can he get? \o?

Ughhhh. It's been oppressively hot and/or smoky here for 4 1/2 weeks now. On the few days where the highs have been < 93^o, there's usually been too much smoke to exercise outside. I've only been able to ride outside 5 times over these many weeks. FIVE. :O

I've lost a lot of strength and stamina, because riding on the trackstand bike only does so much. Though I am SO glad I moved that thing indoors and set it up in the laundry room 3 1/2 weeks ago. It's in the way of everything, but at least the air inside the house is viable. HalfshellHusband also fetched the 'grabber' from the hip kit we're storing in the garage, so we can still get clothes out of the dryer pretty easily, as well as things in the cupboards on the far side of the bike. \o?

I never thought I'd be monitoring the air quality (and its forecast) so obsessively, but this is the longest stretch of smoke pollution we've ever had. None of these fires are actually IN the Sacramento area, but they're burning to the West, the South, and the North of us, and the mountains to the East form a barrier that tends to keep the smoke stuck here. :(

There aren't as many fires in the Northern hills and mountains as we sometimes get, though some are re-burning areas that are very close to where the devastating Camp Fire destroyed entire towns two years ago. The ones to the West and South are an unwelcome surprise. All of this stems from a series of thunderstorms over Northern Californa a month ago that included more than 10,000 lightning strikes and started about 30 fires. Firefighting resources are stretched really thin, and the fires are always hard to contain in the summer. The grass and forests are really dry, and it's a rainless time of year.

Normally, we would escape all of this by going up to Oregon to visit my family, but COVID makes that unfeasible (hence the feeling of being in jail). Even worse, Oregon is also battling several thunderstorm-triggered fires (and at least one caused by arson) that started over Labor Day weekend. One of my sisters is on the edge of an evacuation zone near Portland (she is packed and ready, though), and my mother is in Eugene near another large fire that has destroyed several towns along the beautiful McKenzie River Highway (126). I spent a LOT of time checking fire and evacuation maps for Oregon over these last 5 days. The winds near Portland have dropped down and are shifting back toward the East again (back toward what has already burned), which is good, and there's some hope of rain tomorrow. But how sad for the little towns along 126 and Highway 22 (both gorgeous areas) that have been devastated, and I see that one of the fires has crossed over the edge of the Warm Springs Reservation too. Horrible. As with California, having a bunch of fires all start at the same time makes it nearly impossible to contain any of them. And there are three large ones up North that are in danger of merging together across the Mt. Hood National Forest. :(

Meanwhile, in non-depressing news... this is happening at our house right now:



It's one of those 'grown your own' creatures that I got The Boy as a gag gift, probably from Dollar Tree. I was all set to donate it to Goodwill, and then I thought, No--I want to see how big and creepy this thing'll get. It started off at a diameter of about four inches. Now it's on its second bowl, and it's bigger than a salad plate. It grows verrrry slowly, but eventually its eyes poke up from the water and you have to add more to submerge them again. That's the biggest bowl we have, and I don't know that I'm willing to sacrifice the bathtub if it reaches that size... but I might be. I mean, the package says it can potentially grow up to 6 times larger, so who wouldn't want to try THAT out? \o?